Olwen turned around, letting the spray wash down her back. Stig finished soaping himself down, and stepped out. She joined him a minute later when he was almost finished toweling himself dry.
A long list of messages had arrived in his hold file overnight. He started working through them, building up a summary of events. The Institute had attacked another two clan villages in the Dessault Mountains, with thankfully few casualties. The clans were watching the movements of the Institute troops closely now; they’d been caught out too many times when the raids started, suffering awful fatalities. Surprise ambushes were becoming rare, although combating the Institute forays was using up a lot of clan members, members who should be helping to prepare for the planet’s revenge right now. Stig didn’t have as many people working in his teams as he would have liked.
There had been a couple of disturbances in the city during the night, not quite large enough to qualify as riots, but news about the navy ships had stirred up the general level of anxiety. Shops had been looted, some fires started, cars stolen and used as barricades. Sparky residents flung missiles at police and Institute troops.
The teams that Stig had on duty during the night had been busy tracking Institute troop movements. On the map in his virtual vision it was clear what they were doing, consolidating their hold along a broad passage between First Foot Fall Plaza and the start of Highway One outside the city.
An Institute-assisted police team had raided a warehouse in the docks. Stig recognized it as one he’d been using to store equipment in right up until three days ago. The Institute was definitely picking up its intelligence-gathering operation.
There had also been arrests in the Chinese district on various warrants. Three of those taken into custody worked for the Barsoomian residence. The Institute wasn’t yet challenging the Barsoomians directly, but they were definitely chipping around the edges.
The Governor had certified another three police precinct assistance contracts with the Institute.
“Shit.”
“What’s the matter?” Olwen asked.
“The Governor signed over 3F Plaza.”
“To the Institute? Fuck it!”
“Yeah.” He pulled a fresh set of shorts and a T-shirt from his small bag, then put his force field skeleton suit over them and covered that with a checked shirt and baggy jeans. The long leather biker jacket he’d bought in StPetersburg on Earth went on top. He slipped a slim harmonic blade into the top of his hiker boots. His ion pistols and high-velocity machine carbines slotted into their holsters to be covered by the zipped-up jacket. Grenades clipped into his belt. His arrays with their sophisticated sensors went into his chest pockets. Steel sunglasses with enhanced display functions hung on a purple surfer band around his neck.
Olwen finished dressing for the day in a similar fashion, with baggy sulphur-yellow pants and a green rainjacket with North Sea Power Surfers printed across it.
They left the apartment block together. The streets were virtually deserted, with shopfronts still covered in fine carbon grilles. Ancient civicbots rolled slowly along the pavements, gathering up rubbish and washing away yesterday’s grime. A few early delivery vans raced along the empty roads. Buses with the first shift workers slumped into their seats rumbled past in clouds of diesel fumes.
When Stig looked east, Far Away’s sun was rising above the horizon, sending a rosy glow to soak the city. He stopped at a mobile stall that was just setting up on a corner three hundred meters along the road from the rental house. The owner smiled happily at them as Stig ordered some bacon sandwiches and coffee for breakfast. They drank some fresh-squeezed orange juice while the man flipped their bacon slices on the griddle.
Stig called Keely McSobel, who was on duty in the room above the Halkin Ironmongery store. “Anything near us?” he asked.
“No, you’re cool, the Scottish quarter’s pretty quiet. But they’re really pouring their people into 3F Plaza. It’s not just troops, either. Some tech types are in the gateway control building.”
“Damn, that’s not good. Can you snoop around inside?”
“That’s the second problem. The city net’s links to CST’s center are being eliminated. I think they’re physically cutting them.”
“Dreaming heavens, are we going to be able to get our calls through?”
“I’m not sure. I managed to get a scrutineer inside CST’s arrays. It can’t send much back without being detected now they’ve cut the bandwidth, but from what I can make out the Institute is setting up censor programs on all the Half Way channels. Any call going out through the link to the Commonwealth unisphere will be examined, same for anything coming in.”
“Bloody hell.” Stig finished his orange juice and pulled out a pure-nicotine cigarette. “Good job, Keely. We’re going to scout around 3F Plaza.”
“Be careful.”
They collected the sandwiches and coffee, and he started to tell Olwen about the Institute’s latest accomplishment as they walked along toward Mantana Avenue, which was the quickest route to 3F Plaza.
“That’s very provocative,” she said carefully. “Especially on top of everything else this city is putting up with.”
“Yeah.” He lit the cigarette. “They’ve already armor-plated the route from the gateway to Highway One, now this. It can only mean one thing.”
“The Starflyer’s coming,” she said it with a knowing gleam in her eyes. It was the moment every Guardian dreamed of. The showdown with their enemy. The planet’s revenge.
“Yeah.”
They were very visible going down Mantana Avenue, the broad thoroughfare that linked First Foot Fall Plaza with the main government district. With a little uncharacteristic flourish of ambition, city planners had laid out a three-lane road as a transport centerpiece between the biggest commercial market and storage zone in the city and the civil servants who sought to regulate it. Then a wealthy Russian émigré had gifted the city with a thousand saplings of newly sequenced GM maple fur poplars. The trees were all planted along Mantana, growing fifty meters tall, with leaves that resembled woolly magenta catkins. For nearly a century the arboreal avenue had been one of the city’s grandest sights, with the thick tall trees screening the road from the pavement.
Now, over half of the trees had withered and died from a native fungal virus that had reestablished itself in the southern hemisphere and swept through the city a couple of decades back, spoiling the beautiful wall of drooping leaves that separated traffic from pedestrians. The Barsoomians had provided resistant saplings as replacements, but the uniformity of the avenue would never be regained now, and a lot of the saplings had been vandalized. It left long segments of the pavement exposed.
Stig assumed an innocent, absorbed expression as yet another convoy of six-wheeled Land Rover Cruisers roared along the road toward 3F Plaza, hooting crossly at any other vehicle impertinent enough to be on the same route. The buildings set back from the avenue were three or four stories high, their elaborate faux-Napoleonic façades making them the most sought after addresses in Armstrong City. Their ground floors were individual shops, as exclusive as anything could be on Far Away; the offices above were mostly inhabited by lawyers and the local headquarters of big Commonwealth corporations, the only organizations that could afford the rent.
“Where in the dreaming heavens is everyone else?” Olwen complained as the Cruisers disappeared ahead of them. Even for early morning, there were remarkably few pedestrians abroad; the traffic was reduced as well. Normally there would be a stream of vans and trucks and carts going in and out of 3F Plaza in preparation of the day’s commerce.
“Bad news travels fast,” Stig told her.
Half a kilometer from the Enfield entrance to 3F Plaza they took a side road off the avenue, and made their way through the clutter of secondary streets to Market Wall.